


disaster equals laughter over time

by mimeticpolyalloy



Series: T-1000 Redemption Arc [1]
Category: Terminator (Movies)
Genre: Gen, John is just the nicest kid on the planet here, sarah connor is very much a Rules Mom, uncle bob is uncle bob
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-04-15
Packaged: 2018-10-08 05:02:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10379085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimeticpolyalloy/pseuds/mimeticpolyalloy
Summary: (Alternative titles: "My 2 Dads: Robot Edition")The one where John has this magic power that lets him befriend anyone he sees.Starts at the end of Terminator 2 and continues on post-canon.





	1. red, the shade of history

A loud boom sounded throughout the steel mill. John looked up, and saw--holy shit. The grenade had exploded in the T-1000’s chest, and now before John stood a horrifyingly mangled mimetic polyalloy. From the waist down it looked like it always had, deep navy pants and shiny black shoes. But from the waist up, it was as if someone had been caught in a tidal wave of melted steel. There was a gaping space where the grenade had been, and the T-1000’s head was staring at John from where it was upside down, barely connected to what was left of its body. It’s making a sound that John can only describe as screaming, like a slab of metal being ripped apart — which isn’t very far off from what’s happening, John thought.

The T-1000 starts swaying, and for a split second John thinks it’s going to fall into the molten steel beneath them, the hot orange light reflecting off of the new curves and twists and edges of the T-1000.

But the T-1000 somehow manages to gather enough strength (and maybe pure willpower) to fall to the left, one half (or rather, two-thirds) of its torso crashing onto the other. Its right hand immediately clutches its left side, while its left hand darts up to grasp its neck. It holds the two pieces of itself together, and John sees the two sides beginning to meld together — but it’s slow.

By this time, Sarah is standing up, looking like she’s prepared to grab the T-1000 and throw it over the railing and into the flowing metal beneath them. As Uncle Bob slowly stands, the T-1000 flips onto its back and starts desperately trying to crawl away. It’s still making that awful noise, and as John looks at this thing, this machine whose only purpose is to kill him, he sees what he almost thinks is fear.

Fear or not, something about the scene unfolding in front of him disturbs John — his mother and cybernetic guardian closing in on this machine, curled into itself, kicking its legs in an attempt to squirm away from what must feel like certain death. John’s never seen someone look so horrified. John stands.

Uncle Bob is about to grab at the T-1000 when John runs between them, gripping the tattered leather jacket.

“Stop it!”

The words come out almost on accident, but John doesn’t stop them. He can hear the sound of the T-1000’s desperate scrabbling away behind him.

“Outta the way, John,” Sarah says, white-hot fury burning in her eyes. John’s never seen her so angry. He’s almost scared.

“No! No, just leave him alone!” John looks back behind him, and sees the T-1000. The machine gives him this look before it stumbles to its feet and races away, tripping and leaning against walls and machinery before it disappears from view.

“We have to go after it —”

But Sarah’s cut off by quickly approaching sirens. She and John help hold up Uncle Bob as they try to leave before the authorities arrive — they don’t need questions people can’t handle the answers to.

As they drive away in a stolen car, Sarah at the wheel and Uncle Bob in the backseat, John looks out the passenger side window and can’t help but wonder if he did the right thing.


	2. the guarantee of allure as illusion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John's in a new town and life feels amazingly normal for once.

It’s been a month since the steel mill, since he reunited with his mother, since he met Uncle Bob, since he’d been ripped from his fairly normal life. He has dreams about what happened sometimes, but they’re more nightmares — sometimes he wakes up to Uncle Bob next to him bed, and John just holds onto him, as if he were a small child. But strangely, his dreams never include the T-1000.

But still, things have settled down. Uncle Bob is still there. Sarah says he’s there as security, in case the T-1000 finds them. (Really, that’s only part of the reason. “Uncle Bob” is the closest thing John’s had to a father, maybe the closest thing he ever will have to a father. But Sarah won’t tell you that.)

John is going to school, too — but it’s harder than it was in Los Angeles. His Spanish had been slipping from a lack of practice, meaning that Sarah and Uncle Bob have to help him from time to time. There’s also the stress that comes with having to be ready to leave at any time. There’s always two packed backpacks at the door, just in case they have to leave in a hurry.

It was hard to adjust, after everything the three of them had been through in such a short span of time. They used the arm from the original terminator to repair Uncle Bob’s mangled limb, and, while he still has to wear a glove and jacket, the living tissue is growing back, little by little, day by day. And it took a while, but they finally got the last of the parts needed to fix the rest of him, including his power source. Sure, sometimes his hand will twitch involuntarily, and he might need to power down sometimes and reboot, but it’s still nothing short of a miracle that he can even function. It must have been some kind of godly intervention that lets him still blend in.

And blend in, he does — or at least, enough that he can get some unsteady jobs providing manual labor to those that need it. Sarah’s in the same situation, never being able to keep a long term job. But they make it work, and Uncle Bob and Sarah trade off picking up John from school.

It’s a warm, sunny morning. John is walking to school — he takes this trip alone — and he sees a man in a deep blue shirt, matching blue pants, and shiny black shoes. John does a double-take, but the man is gone. He’s still for a moment, rewinding the scenario in his head before deciding that it must just be lack of sleep and stress getting to him (standardized testing, along with his mother having just lost her job. PTSD never makes life easy.)

Days pass, and he decides that it really was just a trick of the mind. He remembers hearing somewhere that “sleep deprivation is a one-way ticket to temporary psychosis”. (He doesn’t quite understand what that means, but he figures it’s applicable here.)

It’s when he’s at a crowded mall with his mother that he can’t pretend it’s a trick of the mind. Somehow, in the flood of people, a deep blue shirt catches his eye. His eyes move up, to the face of the man in blue, and John’s air goes still in his lungs and throat.

The man has the same dark brown hair and light blue eyes, and even though it isn’t staring at John like it’s imagining every single slow, agonizing way to die and deciding which would fit John best, John is still terrified. He pulls on his mother’s sleeve just as the T-1000 turns towards him.

“Mom, we have to go, now.”

For a second, John is hopeful — maybe it won’t recognize him. But it’s a terminator, and its mission is to kill — sorry, terminate — John. There’s no reason it wouldn’t recognize him. John’s only hope is that it’ll hesitate in front of so many people, so many witnesses. It wouldn’t risk being discovered just to kill me, right? He feels his mother grabbing his arm and pulling him, and he finally gets enough of his wits together to speed up. The last thing he sees is the T-1000, shoving people out of the way, terrifying determination in its face, just like it had looked a month ago in the Galleria.

Sarah drives for an hour before they finally begin to go home — they have to make sure the T-1000 has lost them. John keeps looking behind them, expecting to see a man with giant silver crowbars for hands, like a ridiculous metal mantis-man. When they get home, Sarah locks all the doors, checks all the windows. (She even asks Uncle Bob what John’s science project was about. She breathes a sigh of relief when she hears that clunky voice say “Neptune”.)

Dinner is tense. As expected, Sarah and Uncle Bob want to leave. They’ve made so many plans for this day, that it’d be stupid not to leave. But John’s grades are finally looking up, and he’s started making friends, and he finally feels like a normal kid. It takes some doing (a lot of doing), but he finally convinces Sarah and Uncle Bob to stay. For now, at least. If any of them see the T-1000 again, they’ll leave, but for now they’re staying.

John goes to sleep with a strange, frightening mix of hope and anxiety in the pit of his stomach.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi this is my apology for chapter 1 being so short
> 
> i'm gonna try to make my chapters longer but i tend to do more drawing than anything so this is New to me.
> 
> title is from "Love Again" by Dirt Poor Robins!


	3. it's too late to win so we're aiming to lose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John's luck runs out.

It’s been a week. Over the course of those seven days, John sees: two female cops, one man with light brown hair in an awful mullet, and a man with light hair, a deep royal blue shirt with matching pants, but the most godawful facial hair John has ever seen (he had to fight back a real, actual shudder at the sight). But no T-1000, unless it had changed shape to someone else. But something in John told him that wasn’t the case. By the end of those seven days, the hopeful child in John (somehow he’s still there, despite everything) believes that the T-1000 is gone — it had looked for him and Sarah and given up, maybe, or it thought they lived in another nearby town.

But childlike optimism never much suited John, and the facade is shattered one morning walking to school when he sees the T-1000 sitting on top of the hood of a cop car, looking like it just belongs there. All John can think is shit, he found me, he found us, I’m gonna have to leave, how am I gonna tell mom? But the T-1000 hasn’t seen him yet, or at least isn’t reacting to him. John starts walking again, unaware he had even paused (how am I not dead? he thinks to himself), and after he puts enough space and foliage between him and the machine, he breaks into a run and doesn’t stop until he’s through the doors of the school. But if he had felt a stab of jealousy shortly before the fear had crashed into him, then it wasn’t his fault.

The T-1000 stays with him through each of his classes, the image of him — it, John, it — sitting on the hood of the car replaying in his mind over and over. He even draws a man with crowbars for hands in the corner of one of his worksheets during math class. He couldn’t bring himself to smile with his friends. How could he, when he knows he might never see them again? He keeps thinking of how to bring it up to his mom, to Uncle Bob. He can’t just suddenly bring it up during dinner, and while he could tell Uncle Bob about it and have him tell Sarah, John knows his mother and knows that she would ask him about it — exactly what he wants to avoid.

By the time the final bell rings and he’s with his backpack on the blacktop, watching Uncle Bob walk towards him, he’s decided he won’t say a thing about what happened today. He’s mentally kicking himself, but he just thinks stay cool John, it’ll be fine, he didn’t even see you.

John can barely stand to walk past clothing stores, much less enter them, not with every faceless chrome mannequin setting off his internal alarms. Every too-shiny piece of metal practically puts him into cardiac arrest, even soda cans become silvery blades in his peripheral vision — he jumps a foot in the air when a too-polished wheel flies by on a pickup truck. He has dreams each time he falls asleep — he hesitates to call them “nightmares”. He’s back at the steel mill, that familiar heat and fiery light rising from beneath him. But it’s never him or Sarah or Uncle Bob being killed. It’s just him and the T-1000, crawling away, looking for all the world like it might be afraid.

Three days pass before he sees the T-1000 again. Just like before, John is walking to school when he sees the T-1000 sitting on the hood of a cop car — but this time there’s a real officer standing and talking next to it, and John is taken aback. He stops, takes a step back, moves to hide part of his body behind a nearby tree. John strains to hear whatever it is that they’re talking about. He hears — something about a break in nearby? It’s just what John figures is fairly normal cop business, which… surprises John, to say the least. He decides to just continue on his way to school, leaving before the T-1000 can see him.

One week later. It’s after school, and John is walking by a park on his way home. He sees nothing out of the ordinary, just a woman walking a small, extraordinarily fluffy dog, some kids laughing and chasing each other between the trees, the T-1000 — the T-1000. John sees it just… walking through the park. It doesn’t even have its usual angry look. John watches as it disappears from view behind a crowd of trees. Something about blending in crosses his mind. John leaves, and decides not to think about it too much.

The next day, John isn’t given that choice.

It’s after school, but John had had to stay late to make up a math test that he hadn’t done great on — the phrasing the teacher had used was “bombed” but it honestly wasn’t that bad. John’s walking down an empty street, the sky a beautiful orange, like the poppies that grow in the school garden. John likes this time of day. It’s just him and his thoughts, and he can think through what happened. There aren’t even any cars, the street is entirely empty — until John sees the machine. Standing there. Menacingly. (Alright, fine, it’s sitting on a park bench. But that makes it all the more menacing.)

And John can’t pretend he doesn’t see him (John knows he should be thinking it but that’s not on the forefront of his mind, and if he didn’t know better, he might think the T-1000 is a real human.) when he locks eyes with the T-1000. The machine stands, and a realization hits John: there is no one else on the street, in the park. “I could die here, and no one would know how.” And John breaks out into a sprint, just like his mother told him to, just like that day in the Galleria, what feels like years ago. John runs and runs until his side is experiencing this awful searing pain and his throat hurts from the force of sucking in breath after breath, any one of which might be his last. He’s shoving down garbage cans and recycling bins, throwing discarded chairs from the side of the road onto the sidewalk, anything that might stop or at least slow the machine’s pursuit. What feels like hours pass until John dares to look behind him, to turn his head — shit. The T-1000 is just a few feet behind him, and John feels like an idiot for ever even considering the idea of outrunning this killing machine, this terminator whose mission it is to kill John. John is just starting to turn his head back when he hits someone — they both tumble to the ground, the woman a flash of cotton candy pink and curled blonde hair that looks like it took hours to style. John wonders if the T-1000 will kill the woman first, but as he frantically scrambles to his feet, the warm spray of blood never comes. Even as he sprints around the corner, John doesn’t hear a sound.

He gets home at 5:48, a whole 30 minutes later than he had intended. He mindlessly eats dinner, his brain too addled to bring up the T-1000. He can’t find a moment to mention it anyway, and he goes to sleep with an awful, sick feeling curling in the pit of his stomach.

Two days pass with no sign of the T-1000, but John is still shaken. He finds himself looking behind him, scanning his surroundings, he even looks at the ceiling of every room he enters. But he never sees the T-1000. He’s in the passenger seat of a car, Uncle Bob driving the two of them to pick up groceries, when he sees the woman he had collided with the other day — he sees the woman he had collided with the other day. Alive. John’s eyes widen in shock before he realizes that it’s the T-1000, having taken the woman’s place after killing her. Then John sees the T-1000 as it pulls up next to him, driving a cop car. What the fuck. Of course, Uncle Bob sees it too — nothing gets past him. As the light turns green and Uncle Bob speeds off, John knows he’s moving away, and there’s nothing he can say to Uncle Bob or his mother that will change that.

Saying goodbye to his friends is hardest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry that this chapter took so damn long (but that's just what Depression does)  
> Chapter title is from "We Oughta Know Better" by Dirt Poor Robins (surprisingly)

**Author's Note:**

> Howdy y'all!! This is my first time writing for Terminator so I hope you guys like it haha (also sorry that this first chapter is so short. It pisses me off to no end but here we are)
> 
> Constructive criticism is very much welcome
> 
> Fic title is from the song "Maximilian Von Spee" by Dirt Poor Robins, chapter title is from "I Shot a Man", also by Dirt Poor Robins.


End file.
